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Heavily subsidised irrigation systems have been the government’s measure to improve the farmer’s lives. However, evaluation of the performance of these systems was often overlooked. Thus, this study aims to assess the efficiency of irrigation systems in Davao del Sur, Philippines, according to agricultural, social and economic aspects, namely cropping intensity, functionality and production and monthly average income per hectare, respectively. More than half of the national irrigation schemes exhibited outstanding functionality based on organisation, system and operation and maintenance areas, while almost 75% of the communal schemes have exhibited the same. On the other hand, communal systems have higher cropping intensities (wet – 106% and dry – 116%) than those of the national schemes (wet – 89.8% and dry – 89.1%). Results show that communal systems perform better than those managed by Irrigation Administration. The former have been given the full control over their farm areas, where it is expected that members of the association are able to fully articulate in the decision-making and participate in their activities. Although irrigation managers of the said agency have key roles in the capacity building and management of the irrigation systems, performances of such systems largely depended on how well farmers manage the irrigation association.

To document our experiences as female non-native researchers carrying out qualitative research in another country (Bahrain), and to reflect on our interactions with cultural insiders (CIs) as informants in this qualitative study. CIs share cultural commonalities such as language, social background and culture and are considered accepted members of the local community.

Two Bahraini academics were recruited as CIs for a qualitative research study and informant data was collected through face-to-face unstructured interviews over a period of 16 months. Data analysis involved manual and NVivo analytical processes.

Research findings derived three main themes: perceptions relating to the research participant interview template, views on collaboration in Bahrain, and research practicalities. CI engagement offered an opportunity to get fresh perspectives and insights that ultimately informed and improved the standard of research practice.

As knowledge is subjective, multidimensional and partial, the inclusion of CIs offers a greater opportunity to capture true meaning within the data. Through close proximity to the research context, CIs can share pivotal social insights on the design of interview instruments and process, and on member checking and findings. However, CIs come with their own experiences and views of their community, a recognised limitation in this study.

A CI research protocol, designed to set boundaries and document the steps involved in CI engagement offers a process that may be replicated or adapted in future research and ensures parameters are observed for all parties and affords the security of insider counsel where and when needed.

The methodological approach of incorporating CIs as informants from the Middle East, is novel in management research.

While scaling is a viable approach to respond to growing demand, service providers in contact-intensive services (CIS) – such as education, healthcare and social services – struggle to innovate their offerings. The reason is that the scaling of CIS – unlike purely digital settings – has resource limitations. To help ease the situation, the purpose of this paper is to identify and describe the practices used in scaling CIS to support ICT-enabled service innovation.

The research draws on an in-depth analysis of three CIS to examine service innovation practices. The analysis informs model development for service scaling.

The analysis uncovers three practices for service scaling – service interaction analysis, service pivoting and service validation – and their related activities that are applied in a cyclic and iterative logic.

While the findings reveal that the scalability of CIS is limited and determined by the formative characteristic of personal interaction, this study and its findings describe how to leverage scalability in CIS.

The insights into the practices enable service providers of CIS to iteratively revise their service offerings and the logic of creating value with the service.

This research identifies and describes for the first time the practices for the scaling of CIS as an operationalisation of ICT-enabled service innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the pilot project of collection assessment performed by an academic library for the Computer Information Science (CIS) Department specifically and share the experience involved in this assessment.

In this descriptive research, the library gathered and analyzed a set of evaluation reports for CIS-related print and electronic materials. This assessment includes analyses of physical items, periodicals, electronic resources, peers’ databases, faculty syllabi, as well as departmental allocation fund.

This project shows the importance of collaboration between the library and academic departments on collection evaluation and assessment. It demonstrates that the assessments of a department-specific collection can provide the library with insights into the quality of the collection and help librarians better understand the information requirements of the faculty and students in the department. By analyzing the data collected in the assessment, the library can spend the tight budget on the most needed core materials related to the curriculum and research of the department. This project provides a good example for future routine assessments.

The procedure, results and future work of this assessment provide other academic libraries with insights into and practical solutions to department-specific collection assessments.

The study describes a set of collection assessment activities specific to a disciplinary department undertaken by Spiva Library. Few studies have been conducted to study department-specific collection assessments. This type of study can assist a university library to develop a core collection in support of teaching, learning and research for individual academic departments.

Information seeking is often performed in collaborative contexts. The research into such collaborative information seeking (CIS) has been proceeding since the 1990s but lacks methodological discussions. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and discuss methodological issues in existing CIS studies.

The authors systematically review 69 empirical CIS studies.

The review shows that the most common methods of data collection are lab experiments (43 percent), observation (19 percent) and surveys (16 percent), that the most common methods of data analysis are description (33 percent), statistical testing (29 percent) and content analysis (19 percent) and that CIS studies involve a fairly even mix of novice, intermediate and specialist participants. However, the authors also find that CIS research is dominated by exploratory studies, leaves it largely unexplored in what ways the findings of a study may be specific to the particular study setting, appears to assign primacy to precision at the expense of generalizability, struggles with investigating how CIS activities extend over time and provides data about behavior to a larger extent than about reasons, experiences and especially outcomes.

The major implication of this review is its identification of the need for a shared model to which individual CIS studies can contribute in a cumulative manner. To support the development of such a model, the authors discuss a model of the core CIS process and a model of the factors that trigger CIS.

This study assesses the current state of CIS research, provides guidance for future CIS studies and aims to inspire further methodological discussion.

The purpose of this paper is to portray social learning in cluster initiatives (CIs), namely, to explore, with the lens of the communities of practice (CoPs) theory, in what ways social learning occurs in CIs and discover how various CoPs emerge and evolve in CIs to facilitate a collective journey in their learning process. Subsequently, the authors address the following research questions: In what ways does social learning occur in CIs? How is social learning facilitated through the emergence and evolution of various CoPs in CIs?

The study applies the abduction approach for the interpretation of the collected data and attempts to create the best explanations for the observations on the basis of the CoP theory. The qualitative study of four CIs helped to identify various ways that social learning occurs in CIs and the role of the identified CoPs in the process. Social learning is portrayed as a collective journey within and between CoPs, where the interactions of their members deepen their level of involvement and help them to enhance learning in their CoP.

The paper shows ways that social learning occurs in CIs and describes the role of CoPs. It identifies three types of CoPs in CIs: participants, cooperators and locomotives. Additionally, it documents different ways of social learning in CIs, namely, one-way or two-way information transfer and raising awareness; demonstrating and inspiring; or motivating and educating. It also shows that while potentially every member of a CI has access to these practices, only a limited number of members are actually involved. Social learning in CIs is selective and some CI members accept their role as more peripheral in their CI.

The research shows the application of the CoP theory to the analysis of social learning in CIs, a peculiar type of clusters. It describes how CoPs in the studied CIs varied in terms of the occurrence of learning. Furthermore, it reveals how social learning related to the level of involvement of CI members, namely, with an increase of involvement, the members formed more selective CoPs and strengthened their social learning. Nevertheless, the qualitative approach in the study and the specific sample of the CIs chosen for the analysis do not allow a generalization of the findings.

Although in different CoPs social learning occurs in different ways, at each stage of the development of CIs, the learning process is carried out on the basis of interactions created among members. Therefore, it is important to support the “soft” forms of cooperation within CIs – involving members in activities and developing interactions. In addition, to ensure the growth of their entire CI, coordinators should create conditions for the development of existing CoPs into higher forms, which better support learning. They should also adopt boundary-spanning roles between various CoPs to strengthen social learning in CIs.

The literature on CIs, which are peculiar forms of clusters, is still underdeveloped. The research fills in the gap concerning the ways social learning occurs in CIs. It shows that selectiveness can be observed in this process, and emphasizes the role of interactions developed through CoPs and the benefits offered by them. The study applies the CoP approach. Consequently, it expands the theoretical base in view of the generally lacking studies on social learning in CIs in the literature on clustering. Because the CoP theory has rarely been applied in the management literature, it also augments this specific field.

The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast research on collaborative information seeking (CIS) and expertise seeking (EXS) to identify focal themes, blind spots, and possibilities for cross-fertilization.

Existing research was reviewed. The review consisted of a content analysis of 70 (CIS) and 72 (EXS) studies with respect to the context, scope, process, and setting of CIS and EXS, supplemented with a bibliometric analysis of the references in the reviewed studies.

In CIS, the context is a group of actors collaborating on a shared task. In EXS, the information need is held by an individual but resolved by consulting other people. While the typical scope of EXS studies is source selection, CIS studies mostly concern the consultation of the sources and the use of the obtained information. CIS and EXS studies also attend differentially to the information-seeking process. Only 4 percent of the references in the reviewed studies are cited in both CIS and EXS research. The author concludes that, at present, CIS and EXS are different discourses about similar issues.

Increased interaction between CIS and EXS will advance research in both areas and prevent duplication of effort. Topics for future research are identified. It should be noted that the findings are limited to the 142 studies reviewed.

By analyzing CIS in the context of EXS, and vice versa, this study provides a fresh look at the information-seeking research that attends to collaboration.

Discusses the present‐day economic trans‐formation sponsored by the IMF in the direction of privatization in the Commonwealth of Independent States. Chooses as case study the Muslim CIS bloc as the perfect example of the fiasco of the prescriptions of structural transformation by the socialist and capitalist orders. Adopts a methodological and empirical approach to demonstrate the extreme destabilization and disequilibrium, which are shown to remain embedded in these prescriptions of change. Hence, the monetary, fiscal, trade and pricing policies prescribed by the IMF are under attack as much as the old socialist prescription is shown to have been an unreal one. Gives a brief history of the Muslim CIS bloc pointing to an altogether different approach to structural change desired by these people: the world view of Islam in socioeconomic matters. Gives details of this to bring out the nature of this world view in the form of a universally knowledge‐based model of structural change. Discusses the policy implications in the context of this Islamic knowledge‐based world view.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the value of utilising a holistic ergonomic approach, covering engineering, cognitive and social perspectives, to cultivate beneficial and productive collaborative information seeking (CIS) systems and environments, specifically with regard to three main CIS pillars (control, communication and awareness).

A qualitative research approach, based on a selective corpus of CIS literature, was utilised to perform a content analysis to note if terms and concepts normally associated with engineering, cognitive and social ergonomics can be used to eliminate terms reflecting issues related to three CIS pillars (control, communication and awareness) that can benefit from a holistic ergonomic approach.

The content analysis revealed that a fairly extensive amount of holistic ergonomic terminology is prominent within the CIS literature, therefore establishing a connection between the two disciplines: CIS and ergonomics. This suggests that CIS system issues could benefit from the insights of a holistic ergonomic approach.

Since this is an exploratory study the scope of CIS literature utilised in the content analysis was limited to a selection considered most important by the authors; this should be supplemented by further research.

Intended to instigate interest in further exploration of the beneficial and productive implications and practical application of holistic ergonomics in designing CIS systems and environments.

This is the first research paper in the Library and Information Science literature that explores the potential of utilising holistic ergonomics to cultivate CIS systems and environments.

Critical infrastructures (CIs) are essential components of the built environment. They ensure the interconnectivity and good operability of any major urban environment. CIs are exposed to several disruptions such as natural events, hazards or threats that may disturb their normal functionality. These disruptions may impact societies not only from a socio-economic perspective but also environmentally. Therefore, ensuring the resilience of CIs is crucial to modern cities. This paper aims to explore the main standards and criteria used to assess the resilience of CIs.

A three-stage systematic review process was adopted to retrieve relevant papers. A total of 44 papers were carefully selected, and the content analysis technique was used to thoroughly analyse the papers.

Results show that researchers’ interest to investigate the assessment criteria of CIs resilience increased after 2004. Further, a total of 28 resilience criteria of CIs were identified, of which the most reported ones are organisational resilience; performance loss, disruption and recovery process; resilience metrics and index; safety, security and risk analysis; societies/communities’ resilience and/or social-equity responsibility; dynamic networks connectivity; resilience through design and structural integrity; and economic resilience.

The findings of this research will serve as a solid foundation for the development of hypothesis for future empirical studies into the development of assessment criteria index for CI resilience. Further, the outcomes will contribute to the ongoing international discussions and debate on the appropriate ways to develop CI resilience.